It looks like its been more than a few weeks since I actually posted something here. I’ve been busy with some personal suff.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to keep busy by getting back into radio as a hobby, and the timing for that turned out to be pretty good. There are cheap ($20) dongles that plug into USB ports that were designed to receive digital TV in Asia. Pretty useless here in the US, until some really clever people found out that they could be turned into general purpose receivers with a frequency range of approxomately 52Mhz to 2Ghz.

The best piece of software for using it this way is a windows package called SDR# by Youssef Touil. www.sdrsharp.com

It’s completely free, pretty damn fast, and getting better with each revision. And did I mention that it’s free?

I’ve gotten to know Youssef pretty good from conversations on IRC, and he’s a pretty cool guy. So when I had a chance to contribute something to the project, the code was in pretty good hands, so there wasn’t much I could do there. He has the DSP math and other parts rock solid, and there are some pretty clever people jumping in to help him with other parts of the program. So what was missing was a Quick Start guide for setting up the software. Because of some technical issues with licensing, the install had to be split up into several parts to be installed seperately. Lurking in IRC (freenode #sdrsharp), it became pretty clear that new users kept asking the same questions.

The result is two versions of the same guide. A pdf version, and a web version. Feel free to let me know of any errors or exclusions. I’ll keep the guide updated as necessary, but only when important changes are made to the program, or installation procedures change.

UPDATE: I’ve been asked by several people for translations of the pdf into other languages. If anyone is willing to contribute, I’d gladly post here with due attribution. I’ve been asked for French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Danish, and German. Of course, any language would be welcome.

29 Responses to SDR# Quick Start Guide

Hi there trying to install the SDRSharp application i’m always encountering in this problem,(RTL-SDR/USB is eithere not connected or its driver is not working properly).I tried to use the ZADIG version 157 end before nothing is working.My specs pc is a intel 7 asus MB windows7;eithere my laptop where it run an XP SP1, where i attached from the pccard the dongle TREKSTORE dvb, the chip for sure is the RTL…
Thanks in advance for taking care.

Hi,
I’ve been having a terrible time trying to get SDR# to work with my USRP B100. I’m using the version with EXTIO. I used Zadig to install driver and made sure the driver files are in the same folder as SDR#. I see there is an option for USRP in the device drop down menu but EXTIO fails to make a connection to the USRP. I am able to get it to work with my RTL device. I can get the USRP to work in HDSDR but it’s very shaky and crashes. Any ideas?

I haven’t got a USRP myself (donations always welcome), but if you pop into #sdrsharp on freenode IRC, I’m sure there is someone there that will be able to help you. If I remember correctly, there is more than one regular there with a USRP device, and should be able to give you better answers than I can.

Hi Henry,
I found your quick guide very useful and I translated it in the Italian text.
I saved the work, both as pdf and as a Chrome html document.
If you contact me at the email address, I will send you the two files so that you can see if I did a good job and if it can be published.
Maybe you could also update the text and some images to be closer to current versions of the program before the publishing.

I’ll be doing a new version with updated pics within the next week or so. If you email them to me at atouk at this url (atouk.com), i’ll get what you have up, and we can worry about the next version later. Better to have something up, even if one version behind.

I’ll get both of these up on the site as soon as possible. We had a little weather issues here in NJ (New Jersey, USA), and I didn’t have power for a week or so, so unless I lose power again from the 2nd storm we’re having (4 inches of we snow so far), I should be up sometime today.

I really appreciate the work doing this. I hope others find it helpful. The newer version will be delayed a bit, But I hope you’ll be doing the translation on that one, too.

Saw the ‘challenge’ above. Danish translation coming up. How do I transfer it to you?
I’m working from the HTML document as I don’t have any means of ‘breaking the PDF open’ 😉 , being a Linux user.
If the (haven’t checked!) PDF and the HTML version are different, could you please supply me with the PDF contents in editable format?

Send them to atouk @ this website. If you create the document for the pdf as a word file and send it to me, I can do the conversion. Or you can use an online conversion tool such as http://convertonlinefree.com. The latter probobly the better solution so I don’t mangle it, since I don’t read Danish.

I recently got a DVB-T dongle with R820T tuner from NooElec.com. I cannot for the life of me seem to get it installed properly under my Windows XP system. I tried zadig, but none of the device hints work. Can someone post a step-by-step starting with inserting the dongle into the USB port for Windows XP through settings needed in SDRSharp?
Tnx from this newbie…73 de Arnie W8DU

I an not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but here goes: I would love to use the sdr# application to communicate to my transciever. Basically capture the output from the mouse click event on the “bandscope” display, then format a three character tag along with the content of the freq. variable and send it down the serial port to the radio.
Alas i am not a C developer, i work in boreing proprietary business app dev languages. Is there a “hook” available to the app where i could capture the freq and center freq values within sdr# from another application, and perhaps even update those values, instead of keyboard/mouse input?
Thanks, Jen

QST magazine published by ARRL has an article on how to get on SDR radio and my dongle came on Friday and I’m actively listening now. It’s January 2013 p.30 called “Cheap and Easy SDR by Robert Nickels, W9RAN.

I used Zadig to install the proper driver. Then ran the SDR# program. Instructions say that For the device Other should be changed to RTL-SDR / USB, but I only get RTL-SDR / TCP. I am using Windows XP on Toshiba Satellite A-70.

For Tom Westerfield:
This is a bug in mondevelop. It does not recognized the first line of the .sln file as valid.
“Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File, Format Version 12.00″
^^^^^
change 12.00 to 11.00 and it will work:
“Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File, Format Version 11.00″

For Tom Westerfield:
This is a bug in mondevelop. It does not recognized the first line of the .sln file as valid.
“Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File, Format Version 12.00″
_____________________________________________^^^^^
change 12.00 to 11.00 and it will work:
“Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File, Format Version 11.00″

Help please.
Have follow steps as per link http://www.atouk.com/SDRSharpQuickStart.html. However, there is no option to select RTL-SDR/USB form the “Front end” field. I have used Zadig, follow the instructions outlined in http://rtlsdr.org/softwarewindows to replace the USB diver, but SDR is not recognizing the generic dongle I’m using on a Dell desktop running win 7. I tried on an older IBM T-40, with xp and is working like beautifully!! So how do I get SDR to work with my Dell desktop?

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